by D. C. Toedt
TWO RULES for a successful life (adapted from Mark 12.28-34):
1. If you can't love God, then at least face the facts -- don't try to live in a world of wishful thinking; and
2. If you can't love your neighbor, then at least seek the best for them as for yourself - if nothing else, it makes good evolutionary sense.

September 17, 2012

Educational researchers have shown that telling teachers to change their expectations about particular students was not nearly as effective as training the teachers to change their own behavior towards the students — which led to just the changes in expectations that the researchers had hoped to see. See this NPR Morning Edition story by reporter Alix Spiegel. Money quote: "... to change beliefs, the best thing to do is change behaviors."

March 25, 2009

The Mars Hill Bible Church in Michigan must be doing something right, drawing some 11,000 worshipers each Sunday. One factor seems to be getting congregants to become intensely committed to particular ministries — including some traditionally-clerical ones such as weddings — explicitly labeling these congregants as priests, seemingly in the servant-of-God sense of Exodus 19.6, "you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation," and 1 Peter 2.9-10, “… you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, …. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God ….”

… We believe that every person is a priest with a particular ministry. One family in our church that lives in an underresourced neighborhood started an after-school tutoring program for kids who are struggling. A 70-year-old nurse in our church who's tutoring realized that many people in her neighborhood have never had any basic health care testing. She began doing it for free. She's one of our priests. …

The job of one woman on our staff is to connect people with priests. She has a team of people in the congregation who are wired for mercy and eager to visit the sick. Other people love the whole wedding thing—premarriage counseling and so on—so we have licensed people to do weddings. We assume that the body will take care of itself and that the staff's job is to enlist and empower and encourage.

October 11, 2008

Reproduced below is an email exchange from a week ago, between me and someone who wishes to remain anonymous. I responded to this person by interspersing comments into the text of his/her first email to me. (I broke up the paragraphing for easier reading, and am using Mark Harris's practice of putting long quotes in a different color.) I'm posting this with the other person's permission, with certain identifying details redacted.

I get emails like this every so often. There are more than a few people like this out there. As putative followers of Jesus, part of our job, I believe, is to try to help these folks to take baby steps — which might be very difficult for them — in the direction of God.

===================

First, I'd like to thank you for your wonderful website ... I've been readingthrough it today, and it is helping me make some decisions on my faith.

Just to give you a little background on myself, I'm a XXXX living in XXX. Although I was baptized, I was raised in XXXX by agnostic / atheist parents [...] who generally scoffed at the idea of God.

Generally that led to me growing up in the same vein, although I didn't really think of the implications of an agnostic lifestyle until early adulthood.

Around that time, I considered the subject more, and I would say that throughout my 20s I vacillated between a belief in some sort of "spirituality" and fairly strong agnosticism.

I should also say that I'm highly scientifically minded, and have had a very difficult time accepting many of the stories as set forth by the Bible or the belief in a God that I could not scientifically verify.

[...]

For whatever reason, over the past few months (and certainly more so, weeks) I've once again become interested in the topic, so I launched a full-scale research effort.

I've looked down various atheist rationales, read the theories of some philosophers and looked at religion (mostly Christianity).

Unfortunately, most religions simply do not seem to acknowledge reality and what science has taught us.

That being said, I think that your visions of Christianity and religion reconcile rather nicely with modern science. The Big Bang does seem to me to indicate some variety of beginning.

So, as I first mentioned, I'd like to thank your for you website. I don't know how much "faith" I truly have, but as you present it, God seems plausible to me, and I'd like to explore further. At the very least, it is comforting. [DCT: Thanks!]

I have a few questions that I was hoping you could help me answer, if not, I understand. [DCT: I’ll try ….]

==========================

How do you reconcile all of the unconverted souls throughout history with Christianity? ... [H]ow do you envision them fitting in under your vision of God?

[DCT RESPONSE: I don’t worry about that. Orthodox Christians claim that to be saved, you have to believe X, Y, and Z (for example, that Jesus is God Incarnate and his suffering and death atoned for the sins of mankind). Jesus, on the other hand, reportedly told the inquiring scholar of the Law, in essence (Luke 10:25-37), that if he followed the Summary of the Law, then he’d live eternally — “do this and you will live.”

Inasmuch as we can’t control whether we ‘love’ God and our neighbor (at least I can’t), I usually paraphrase the Summary of the Law as entailing:

• striving to put God first — which entails, among other things, as best we can, facing the facts of the reality he wrought, along with keeping in mind that whatever God might be, we ain’t it; and

• seeking the best for others as we do for ourselves.

It seems to me that on the whole, individuals and groups that follow these two basic principles are far more likely to have their descendants survive to reproductive age, and for their cultures to continue being practiced.

In other words, in emphasizing the Summary of the Law, Jesus put his finger on what I think is a crucial part of the fundamental fabric of Creation.

Getting back to the question of the afterlife: It also seems to me that a super-intelligent Creator, who set up so many interacting natural processes that have produced us, his ‘created co-creators’ (in the words of Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner), would not just consign us to nothingness when we die.

Why? Because eventually we’d figure out that there was no future for us after this life. That would be pretty demotivating, no? Such demotivation likely would make us of little further use in the continuing creation.

That might be just fine with God, but in the absence of evidence to that effect, I’ll go with my speculation that he won’t just discard us like so much used sandpaper.

By no means do I assert that for sure this is what’s happening; I just say it’s as plausible as any scenario posited by the virulent atheists.

In any case, life is full of gambles. The evidence appears pretty compelling that the Creator has set things up so that, on the whole (and not without horrible exceptions), life doesn’t seem too terrible for us, and it seems to be getting better over time.

I’m willing to gamble on trusting the Creator that, in the very long term, things will work out OK for all of us.]

==========================

Also, I have always had a difficult time understanding how mentally impaired people fit into the religious fold. In instances of schizophrenia for instance, who is the soul?

[DCT RESPONSE: I don’t worry about that either – “it is what it is”; see also the response above about life after death.]

==========================

Perhaps these questions are too mundane, but I'm trying to reconcile these ideas with a Christian view of God.

[DCT RESPONSE: If by the Christian view of God you mean the Trinity, who (sometimes) answers prayers, rewards the ‘good,’ and punishes the ‘bad,’ I place that view in the same category as the Ptolemaic view of the universe: it explains a few things in an OK way, but ultimately it’s unsatisfactory.

==========================

Also, I've briefly looked at the churches in my neighborhood, and most appear to be fairly traditional in the teachings of Christianity. Do you know how I could find some that are more along the progressive lines that you seem to represent?

[DCT RESPONSE: ... If I were starting from scratch, I’d look at the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the United Church of Christ, and the Unitarian Universalists (although from what I’ve read, the UUs have been pretty much captured by the atheists, agnostics, Wiccans, etc., and theists are made to feel like a distinctly-uncomfortable minority).

Finally, is it ok for me to reach out to a priest in a local church to discuss these ideas, or would he / she be upset with my uncertainty of faith?

[DCT RESPONSE: By all means! Keep in mind that there are great priests like my rector (in the blog posting just cited, I tell a story about one of our conversations), but there are also some real duds, who get threatened if you even suggest that their worldview might be suboptimal. If you run across one of the latter, don’t get discouraged.]

September 04, 2007

Apparently Jewish congregations are experiencing some of the same attendance issues as Christian churches that find themselves competing with the Little Church of St. Starbucks (or St. Mattress) :

Scott A. Shay, the author of “Getting Our Groove Back: How to Energize American Jewry,” said, “Let’s not forget that more than three-quarters of American Jews don’t go to any synagogue on a regular basis.

“Each movement realizes that the real struggle for the future and soul of American Jewry are those who are outside of the synagogue today,” said Mr. Shay, a banking executive who has been active in Jewish organizations.

“Each movement is really struggling with, ‘How do you bring them in?’ ” he said. “This prayer book is an attempt toward that for the Reform movement.”

June 05, 2007

In the Houston Chronicle, Purva Patel reports that religious organizations are increasingly borrowing money for their building projects, not just raising it in contributions. And they're building structures that have multiple uses, not just worship space:

Religious organizations today are trying to fill community needs, such as day care, health care and other social services.

"In some churches they don't even put pews in anymore," said Sidney Taylor, of Nationwide Church Consultants in Houston. "They put chairs they can remove. They're creating space so it's used for more than just sitting."

A church without pews? Next thing you know, they'll be focusing on feeding the poor, clothing the naked, and other liberal touchy-feely Millennium Development Goal stuff — and then who will make sure people have the proper theological beliefs and sexual practices?

March 07, 2007

In a prior career phrase I did a lot of legal work with sales people. It seems to me that sales work and evangelism amount to pretty much the same thing: persuasion, that is, helping someone to adopt a new mindset and then to act on that mindset. This experience has made me tend to think of evangelism, especially to nonbelievers and doubters ("NBDs"), as a sales problem.

Servanthood: Answering the customer's specific objections

Sales work isn’t just order-taking. A sales rep seldom has the
luxury of sitting back and waiting for customers to come to him, begging for the product. This is particularly true if a prospective customer isn't convinced she needs the product in the first place, as tends to be the case with NBDs; in that situation, an effective sales rep must be a servant whose most important tasks, arguably, are these:

to identify the prospect's objections to buying the product;

to do the necessary homework to find answers that address the objections; and then

to provide the prospect with those answers, in a manner that’s convenient for her.

Not all salesmen do this, of course (just the good ones). Imagine this conversation between a prospective customer and a not-so-good salesman:

Prospective customer: “Hey, I dunno about your product; it's not clear to me that I need it, and besides, what about [specific objections X, Y, and Z]?”

Salesman: “Have you read books A and B and C? You haven’t? I’m astonished; the answers to your objections are all there. Go read them, then come back and we’ll talk.”

Think the prospect will do as the salesman asks? That's highly doubtful; chances are that our salesman has blown that particular sale.

Unfortunately, some evangelists react in the same way the salesman did when NBDs point out their objections to The Faith Once Delivered. These evangelists seem to think that an appropriate response to the "prospect" is, "the answers to all your objections can be found in the writings of the great Christian thinkers; go read those writings, come back and show us that you're conversant with them, and then we can talk about your objections, if you still have them."

The Great Commission doesn’t allow us the luxury of such a passive approach. Jesus reportedly commanded his followers, not just to preach, but to “make disciples” of all nations. His phrasing suggests that he was interested not just in effort, but in results. This means that, when NBDs raise objections to the Christian faith, we need to respond the way a good sales person would, and that is, as servants: We need to do the digging, and we need to come up with specific, targeted, persuasive responses to those objections.

But what if the problem is in the "product" itself?

The persistent decline in mainline Protestant church attendance of recent decades, especially among the educated, suggests that the church' s evangelism efforts may have deeper problems than just poor sales work. The religion about Jesus, proclaimed by the church for hundreds of years, has some serious credibility problems. Certainly that religion has enjoyed considerable success for centuries; it's been responsible for much good (and much evil). But the brute fact is that the claims of traditionalist Christianity are seriously vulnerable to cold-eyed critical scrutiny.[1]

For example, here’s one credibility problem that I would guess makes a huge impression on NBDs: The church doesn’t offer any verifiable reason to be a Nicene Christian instead of a Mormon, a Muslim, or even a Moonie. Think about it for a minute. Every one of those religions claims, more or less, to be the one true faith. Yet all of them are based on unverifiable — and mutually-contradictory — theological assertions. They can't all be true, and there's nothing to confirm that any of them is.

Some traditionalists argue otherwise. They claim, for example, that people who truly believe the tenets of Christianity tend to be blissfully happy. But if we do a differential diagnosis, we immediately note that people find similar happiness in other religious beliefs (and even in non-religious practices such as yoga and meditation). It's great when people find happiness through trust in Jesus, but it doesn’t prove much, at least nothing that supports traditional Nicene christology and soteriology.[2]

Competing with theological "nonconsumption"

Like the rest of us, NBDs know the world is full of misguided claims. Sometimes the folks making these claims are well-meaning, but often they aren't. As a result, plenty of NBDs simply shrug their shoulders about religion, dismissing all unverifiable theological claims. They see no need to spend any time thinking about such things; instead of participating in a church, for example, they spend their Sunday mornings at Starbucks with the newspaper.

In sales terms, these NBDs aren’t satisfied with any of the theological “products” being offered; in their view, nonconsumption is a perfectly-acceptable and indeed preferable choice.

A parable

A widget company's sales were declining. A few of its customers had switched to a new brand of widget, but more
and more customers and prospects were deciding they didn't really need widgets in
the first place. They reasoned that it's impossible to tell whether widgets in fact were useful enough to justify the cost and
inconvenience of using them.

The widget company
came up with a new ad campaign touting the claimed benefits of widgets. But the company could never come up with evidence to verify those claims, and sales continued to decline. The
company's board of directors decided that the sales- and marketing VPs weren’t
sufficiently fervent in their belief in widgets; the board replaced those individuals with energetic, enthusiastic, true
believers. But an alarming number of prospective customers continued to decide they didn't need widgets at all.

The widget company shouted out to the public: “Wait! You don’t understand!
If you use widgets, you'll be happy forever when you die, but if you
don't, you’ll face an eternity of misery!” But the company was unable
to point to a single example of anyone who had verifiably
incurred either eternal happiness from using widgets, or eternal misery from not doing so. Widget sales
declined still further, along with the company's credibility.

* * *

If the widget company’s shareholders are lucky, at some point, the board of
directors will tumble to the real problem: Fewer and fewer customers and
prospects see any reason, let alone a need, to use widgets any more. Customers and prospects know they have alternatives to
widgets that, to all appearances, offer comparable benefits at less
cost. For them, the choice is a no-brainer.

Sure, the customers
might turn out to be wrong. It could be that using widgets really was
the only way to go. But if the widget company had gone out of business in the
meantime, it would have failed in its mission. The company can solve
its problems only by taking a hard look at its line of widgets,
realistically diagnosing their flaws, and fixing them.

Time for a fresh look at an old version of the "product"

The church is in danger of going down the same path as the widget company. With good reason, fewer and fewer "prospective customers" are believing the claims we make about our theological "product." We're not going to compete successfully with NBDs' theological nonconsumption by just repeating the same old unverifiable sales pitches over and over. It's time for us to face those facts.

Happily, we have an attractive alternative product that we can offer. If we believe the reports of the gospels, the religion of Jesus — that is, what the man actually preached — was a compelling one back in his day. It's equally compelling now, for reasons that fit quite well with an NBD's mindset. [3]

That's what the church should be "selling" in its evangelism efforts.

If we were to refocus our efforts on the religion of Jesus, would that actually do a better job of bringing people to God? I could tell a few anecdotal stories about intelligent, educated friends who’ve said to me, in effect, what you’re saying makes sense; why doesn’t the church preach that. But an even better example is Joel Osteen at Lakewood Church, right up the street from my house. I’ve heard him preach several times on TV and once in person. From what I can tell, Osteen's sermons are essentially variations on, and corollaries of, excerpts from the Sermon on the Mount. So far as I know, Lakewood's congregation never recites the Nicene Creed, whose tenets I'm not sure are even mentioned much there. Yet Osteen packs them in, Sunday after Sunday; his is one of the fastest-growing megachurches around. Lakewood's high attendance is no doubt due to a lot of factors, but deemphasizing much of traditionalist Christian doctrine doesn't seem to have hurt it.

[2] Traditionalists typically respond to critiques of their doctrines with other counterarguments such as, "the early Christians died for their beliefs, and no one would die for a lie!" That fact doesn’t make those beliefs true; in any case we find a similar willingness to die in other religions as well. I address this and other traditionalist responses here; scroll down to “Some Possible Counterarguments.”